RedBeard’s Curious Life

Just over a year ago, I lost my mother to cancer, lymphoma specifically. RIP Jane Campbell, 1955-2007.

Obviously it’s taken me a while to kind of recover, and I think writing something about the process might help me some more. I’ve actually refrained from writing other blog posts because I didn’t want to let this pass without committing something to written words. I don’t aim to depress myself or others, although I’m sure a few tears will escape my eyes while writing the next several paragraphs.

She fought the cancer and endured treatment for many months before it overcame her. Nothing quite compares with the experience of picking up the phone one morning and having your sobbing father say you don’t have much time to say goodbye. She proved wrong the doctors’ estimate of 2 days, more than doubling that in the face of fatal lung failure, congested with metastasized tumors. We ended up having sufficient opportunity to say our goodbyes, talk about fond memories, settle affairs, and partly work through our grief before even completely losing her. It was a grueling several days in the ICU with no humidity, not knowing when the time might come or what to do afterwards.

I will definitely miss a number of things about my Mum, especially her strong character and caring nature. We had plenty of disagreements and fallings-out, but we never held a grudge against one another, and she was always so pleased with the accomplishments I’ve made in life: good grades, nice friends, fun & well-paying jobs, and all the other little things. She didn’t micro-manage my life but rather left me to my own devices, although there were times when I felt she and my dad made decisions for me that weren’t in my best interests - going to school out of state while moving across the country left me feeling pretty lonely, but I came out of that in the end and met some cool people along the way. She always had compelling tales from her childhood, like stealing the neighbor’s cat, riding the train to school, her brother heading off to boarding school, living in various exotic places like Singapore, and many others that presently elude my memory.

She was rather different from me, but those are probably the things that stood out the most to me. She had a really nice signature, always identical, flowing smoothly through sharp lettering and annunciated with a dominant but relaxed J. She had a knack for making friends, easily eliciting life stories from people mere minutes after meeting them; we were always on good terms with the local Chinese restaurant because she’d befriended the manager. Our cat always loved her, perhaps because she always fed him the good stuff, but he was always following her through the house or curled up by her side. She wasn’t the epitome of health (she was overweight and had high blood pressure and diabetes), but one of the things she expressed regret for was her lack of physical activity - she stopped the swimming she had enjoyed in her youth and the walking she often did around town in England - and she urged me to take better care of myself than she had of herself.

A number of my significant life experiences have been shared exclusively with my Mum. We visited England the summer I graduated from university and took a blitz tour of London in a day that gave me many good photos. I would have ended up in a jail cell had she not come to bail me out after getting arrested for running a stop sign. She visited me at Georgia Tech and we ate steak for Thanksgiving dinner in downtown Atlanta, when the holiday would otherwise have been dull and boring on the deserted campus. Living in Epsom while my dad worked in Scotland during the weekdays, she played a huge role in my early development. My brother tagged along on some of those, but my mother was obviously the dominant factor in all of them.

It’s clear to see that I’d be in a very different place without my mother’s support and guidance, and it still makes me sad that I won’t be able to further reward her with the various experiences most people eventually get to enjoy. She’ll never have the chance to babysit her grandchildren, or even to know their mother. She won’t ever enjoy a retirement in a warm, relaxing place. She won’t befriend yet another Chinese restaurant manager. She won’t visit her friends and family in England again, or travel to Italy where my brother was born. Clearly she’s not the only one missing out here - all of those things involve numerous other people who have been robbed of the possibility of knowing this lovely woman.

Before I had WordPress all set up, I was still ranting away. Please take a moment to reflect on those old rantings. Back then my primitive php skills, combined with massive spambot attacks, meant you could not comment on them, but this fancy blog system suffers less from those problems and you should post any commentary here. Some of those rants have lost their lustre, but the essence of some still survives. I’ll give a brief rundown of how I view each of them now after a couple years have passed:

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The primary thing to mention regarding the latest season of TV is that NBC is back with a vengeance. Tired of playing 4th fiddle to the other networks, they’ve really got a strong ensemble of shows, especially if you like witty comedy. Among their line-up are some of the best shows currently on the air: The Office, My Name is Earl, 30 Rock, Studio 60, Heroes, Medium, Scrubs. You might find it an overwhelming list to consume, so I’d recommend sampling a little of each and seeing what sticks. Conan O’Brien is still the reigning king of late-night, so tune him in if you’re up late.

Fox also has a decent line-up, focusing mainly on drama. Their current decent shows include House, 24, Prison Break, Bones, Family Guy, and American Dad.

ABC has a few shows that seem to have devoted followings, although I don’t really make it a point to watch them. These include Lost, Grey’s Anatomy, What About Brian, and Ugly betty.

CW (the recent merger of WB & UPN) seems to have only one show worth watching, but it’s quite good: Veronica Mars.

CBS has further entrenched themselves in the realms of crime investigation and reality shows, none of which really appeal to me. I watched the Ghost Whisperer for a while but it’s a bit too melodramatic.

I’d also like to point out that a number of these networks use flash on their websites to display show information. This is quite disappointing, as it makes things difficult to find and doesn’t work with browser history. Only NBC & CBS have non-flash sites, but even they use annoying popup menus to display their collection of shows. Here’s hoping Web 3.0 is better.

Games I played this past fall: Hitman Blood Money, Max Payne 2, Dark Messiah, Dead Rising, Gears of War, Viva Pinata, and the Burger King games.
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Notes from my gaming sessions this summer.

Outline form, I can’t be bothered to rewrite into paragraphs.
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I don’t do a ton of driving, as I live quite close to my office and try to avoid rush-hour traffic. Despite this relative lack of exposure, I encounter many incidents that are… less than optimal while driving on the public roads around here. Some straddle the line of legality, some are just annoying habits, and some are shortcomings of the traffic infrastructure. Without further ado:
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Immortality is a concept that crosses the mind of most people from time to time, whether it be in the form of the Highlander, the timeless literature of Shakespeare, the heinous acts of Hitler, or simply spreading their essence via offspring. Indeed, as all life struggles against the universal entropy to preserve a semblance of order, humans take it to the next level by trying to preserve individuality, especially that of notable specimens. While all of the above approaches to immortality are held in similar esteem, modern medicine continues to make effective steps towards the significant extension of individual lifespan. Since this approach is hardly exclusive of the others and can be explored in a scientific manner, I shall present some material on the topic.

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I’d like to announce my candidacy for the 2020 presidential election. You might think it a little premature, but this country needs a serious kick back into gear before it becomes totally derailed, and I see no reason to wait until I’m of legal age to begin spreading the word. Our national self-image is so disjointed from reality that it’s become a comedic target, and this rift is only serving to increase our complacency and widen the gap between our peak potential and our current state of affairs.

My platform? Elementary, dear reader. This country needs an engineer to properly address our political and societal machinery that has become rusted and inefficient. Many areas need to be modified, and nothing is safe from reform. Among the areas that need the most work:
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We’ve had devices called PDAs for a while now, purporting to be “personal digital assistants”, but in reality they’re more like digital address books. A real assistant doesn’t just file your notes and remind you of appointments and force you to do most of the work involved in such tasks; a real assistant does useful work, such as taking notes, fleshing out dictations, compiling information into reports, and arranging appointments around the schedules of all involved. Some argue that with modern organizational software (think MS Office, Outlook/Exchange in particular), the effort of performing assistive tasks is diminished to the level that someone can do the work themselves just as quickly and effectively as telling a human assistant to do it.

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So, let’s see what’s going on in the world lately…
Litigation, extortion, and gaming ahoy!

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